The growth of the Internet and high-speed network connections has enabled the proliferation of collaborative document creation and modification. Multiple users are able to create, view, edit and comment on a single document, often in real-time. While text documents are particularly well suited to these shared collaborative models, documents such as drawings, graphs, pictures and other graphical elements have characteristics that do not lend themselves to online collaboration.
Graphical documents, by their nature, require exact replication of shapes, lines, colors and constituent elements. A drawing created on one device may look drastically different when viewed on another device with a different display resolution, different color depth, different screen size and the like. If the juncture of two lines is displayed differently on two devices, even being offset by a tiny amount, the entire drawing will be compromised.
Graphical documents often contain numerous layers of graphic objects, which may be difficult to manipulate with a pointing device, such as a mouse or fingertip in the case of a touchscreen device.